Too Tired...

...to paint, so I thought I'd look at the monoprints.  First, some time spent on hunting up threads to go on a group of monoprints...so far so good...

That pale yellow looks odd in the ball, and might not be used on the top print, but it works nicely at a single strand on some of the paler versions.  So then on to stitching the lutradur monoprint...

Long stitches, reflecting the movement of the paint.  The problem with stitch at this size is that it has a tendency to pull the fabric, no matter how careful you are, so I'll probably fuse this piece to a backing, for preference something with colour in it, which will reinforce the gold colours in the background due to the semitransparent nature of the lutradur.    Again, so far, so good.  Except that I didn't seem to have found quite the right shade of green (most of what's reading as blue in this image is closer to green), so I went through to the studio to see if I could find anything suitable( (so much for sitting still)/  And there was the thought that I could perhaps find something to put in that upper left hand section, a piece of fabric perhaps, in a ring shape.

I don't often use embellishments, which is rich from someone with a substantial bead collection... but I did want to find something to use here, to break up the movement of all that green, mostly, as it seemed very dominant.  And I found a white box, but I couldn't remember what was in it... Jackpot!  Not only did it have thread, it had some embellishments, too, which I could vaguely remember intending to use on a different piece, some time ago (don't ask me which: clearly it never happened). 

One of those embellishments was this button :

Right size, lovely texture but wrong colour, though I did love the striations running through it.  A bit more hunting found me this...

Odd, isn't it?  It's a cardboard circle which I suspect came out of the lid of a jar of something.  It has a blue mark that refers quite nicely to the background, and it's the right shape.  Reader, I glued it on.  I intend to stitch over it with more large scale stitches, a bit like shisha gone mad.  I may not use the  suitable green thread after all... the thread I used on the right hand side will be perfect. 

And that's the state of play so far.  It's not the best thing I've ever made, but it's not bad, either.  And it does go to show that I do keep some very strange things in my boxes.  Strange, but useful. 

Changing The Approach.

I would like to think I'm an innovator.  I would like to think that I do unusual things, change things around, try things out...  Yesterday, though, I realised just how conditioned I am to doing things a certain way.  Perhaps we all are. 

I'm still struggling with stamina, but I wanted to do something with my hands, so raked out an unfinished piece. It's a piece of hand dyed cotton, to which I'd embellished a piece of patterned silk, and a scrap of velveteen, with a couple of smaller pieces of  fabric added.  It makes me think of a boat at sail in a high wind, somehow, although the 'sail' looks like a landscape, with fields and flowers.   I decided to add stitch to it, and fished out some hand dyed perle for the upper area.  Here it is so far.  You can see the stitch in the upper right hand corner.

I chose irregular crosses; at the time, I wasn't sure why.  My intention, though, was to fill the whole of that upper area with these stitches.  And then, suddenly, I wasn't so sure. 

Those stitches, to me, looked like a flock of birds, swirling around in that area.  I didn't want to lose that sense of movement, though I admit it would be better in a stronger contrasting colour, but I don't have anything better to hand, and the contrast is stronger in real life than in the image.  Why, I wondered, did I feel that it was important to fill the whole of the area with stitch?  I think it has to do with traditional quilting, perhaps, which is where I started out.  Lots of small, even stitches, covering the whole of the piece.  I've never done small and even, in art, because I believe in the power of the random mark, though the few traditional quilts I have made over the years follow that basis...and for good, technical reasons.  There are no good technical reasons to fill this piece with stitch, however.  I don't need to hold layers together.  It will never be washed.  I don't need to concern myself with wrinkling or creasing.  This is about a message, the creation of meaning, not about structure or technique or anything else. 

And at that point, I was reminded of one of the women I worked with at Dereham Hub.  She took to stitch like a duck to water.  I'm not naming her to respect her privacy.  She gifted me with some of her work before we left Norfolk: here is an example.

I love this little square.  I think it's spontaneous, well balanced and joyful.  Instinctual. She took pieces of fabric that spoke to her, cut bits off and stitched them on using a series of cross stitches.  She hasn't worried about what side to start or finish the thread: there are little bits sticking out on both sides.  Some of the crosses, are real crosses, others are close, but not quite there.  I don't know if anyone showed her cross stitch, or if she invented it for herself, incidentally.  I like the way the stitches lie.  I suspect she used the first thread that came to hand.  I know that she had no real sense of utility in stitching; when she stitched a bag, she stitched through both layers, making the functionality of the bag useless...it was, though, a very attractive bag shaped, reversible hanging. 

I'd like to make work that is much closer to this piece, than to what I make at present.  Genuine mark making, without worrying about anything at all.  Doing what seems right, with no thought of functionality or even of practical consequence.  If I can do it... I can also work through any technical issues that that deed creates....though in truth, I can't imagine that any would arise.  How interesting that, in the end, this becomes a question of self belief, of letting go, of pure creativity. 

So...what of the piece?  I think that I've added enough crosses.  I don't feel the need to add any more.  I'd like to add some stitch lower down, in a darker colour, to reflect this idea of sea... might couch, might embellish... might do nothing at all.  At this moment, my money's on nothing at all.  The level of discomfort I have with it as it is, is less than I suspect it would be if I added more stitch.  Leaving it as it is ensures maximum ambiguity.  If you want to read it as a ship, you can.  If you want to read it as fields and a loch, you can.  Or anything else you see in it.  I'm not going to impose my map on the world on the piece.  I want the same, instinctual feel as the green piece has.  And now I need to find something else to do....

Unexpected Changes, or Feline Intervention

I thought it was time I finished the stitch on Borderlines, so that was what I did this morning, until the birthday boy swept me off for breakfast (yummy pancakes and fresh fruit).

I'm quite pleased at the way this is turning out; only one fair sized section to go, and the stitch will be complete.  The nature of the piece has changed, somewhat. however, as I discovered when I picked it up to start stitching.  Part of the paper block on the left hand side of the quilt is no longer as it was when I started.  Here it is now...

Yup...it's frayed, distressed, nay, disintegrating in parts.  What can have done this?  Well, that's where the feline intervention comes in.  I have the habit of putting whatever I'm stitching behind me, on the back of the sofa.  Turns out Merlin has been sleeping on it.  I said early on that the paper was quite fragile, and here's the proof.  Some of it has just disappeared, although by and large, it's hanging on in there, thankfully.  Also thankfully, I like the result.  Just as well, really, as it would take an inordinate amount of work to replace it.  And fortunately, the books are too small to treat like this, so we won't be having a repeat performance, though if anyone wants an alternative method for distressing hand made paper, here it is, help yourself.  Just keep your fingers crossed that your cat doesn't attempt to shred it (Mollie probably would have).

The Right Thing?

Hand sewing, and thinking.  In that order, pretty much.  Finished a section of hand stitch on Borderline, the yellowish rectangle of hand made paper.

My original intention had been to smother that area in tiny seed stitches; as you can see, I've changed my mind, and limited the stitch to the edges, in a sort of uneven border.

So why the change of heart?  Well...because of the fragility of the paper, I had begun by stitching all the way round the edges.  In places where there were holes or tears, I stitched fairly intensively, to make sure the tears didn't get any worse as I worked.  When I had finished the first pass, I realised that that looked interesting, and that really, all I needed to do was to add a bit more stitch in the areas that had only really got a single line of stitch in the first pass, but otherwise, it was done.  Plus, I looked carefully at the areas in the centre: here's a close up.

The texture in this is remarkable.  I felt that intense stitch, instead of adding to that, would detract from it, by flattening it out.  So I stopped. 

And now, I have to decide what to do next.  I think I'm going to add more stitch to that circular area top right.  I'm trying to decide whether or not to remove the knots...yes, the knots that took me an inordinate amount of time to create .  I have two options.  Either remove them completely or add more, because they look off balance.  My money's on removal.  Yes, they took an eternity.  Yes, I'm proud of them.  No, they add nothing much, and may well detract from the whole thing...so several hours work is going to be cut out, because it feels like the right thing to do.  I'll be adding more lines, but this time, running stitch, rather than single long stitches.  And then I'll look again, to see if that was the right thing to do.

And, in the end, that's all every single decision boils down to : is it the right thing to do for this piece?  No matter how long you spent on it, no matter how much you like it, if it doesn't work, it has to come out.  Either that, or you have to take that favourite area, and rebuild the piece around it. That never crossed my mind in this instance, but it's something I've done with paintings, quite regularly.  Either way, it's extra work, and it may take you a long way from your original intention...but it's worth it.

And now I'm off to cut out those knots...sigh.

Slow, Slow...

...slow, slow, slow...no particular variation in pace when you're hand stitching.  And that's a good thing; it's meditative, rhythmic.  I'm about three quarters of the way through stitching the piece 'about' ME I showed you here.  This shows you the progress so far...

...and a closeup, so that you can see the stitch...

As I waited for this to load, it struck me that this is one of the very few, if not, indeed, the only art piece I've made entirely of commercial fabric.  Usually the focus is on hand dye, but I don't have much of that, any more, and it'll be a while before I'm set up well enough to generate some. 

You can see that the stitch is very intense throughout, so far.  I'm planning to do more of this random stitch in the other three borders, but with a larger stitch size.  The photograph suggests a considerable amount of distortion, which is caused by that intensity of stitch, but I'm confident that that will resolve itself as I complete the stitching. 

This is the perfect piece to take places; so far, I've stitched on it in the doctor's waiting room, as well as the local fabric shop (of which more, another time).  I usually have a piece of work that I can carry about in a pocket, for those waiting rooms.  I hate sitting around doing nothing, which is a bit unfortunate, given I have ME; there are times when that's all I'm capable of doing.  Hoping to get the stitch on this finished this week, so it'll be sitting beside me on the sofa....I do love my sofa...

Nothing Is Ever Wasted.

It's what I tell people, when they say, that didn't work out, or, I don't know why I wasted my time doing x, or some variant thereof.  No experience is ever wasted.  At some point, you will use it, even if it isn't directly.  So, when I found this very small silk piece and thought, is this actually worth working on, that should have been the thought that went through my head.  I'm ashamed to say it wasn't.  I very nearly put it in the bin.

Admittedly it doesn't look terribly prepossessing.  Habotai silk, hand dyed, tiny slivers of pale blue tissue paper that I coloured somehow, long stitches with knots either end... whilst it looks better in 'real life', it certainly needs a good iron.  It's one of those sketches, I think, that I've been talking about over the past while.  And it's so small, and so delicately coloured, that additional work won't make it into a silk purse, as opposed to the proverbial sow's ear...  And yet...  So I put it aside, and have been glancing at it for at least a week.  I'm a great believer in putting time into a process, particularly when there seems to be nowhere left to go.

And here's the upshot of that invested time.  I have quite a few strips of Lutradur XL, which I want to turn into textile books, but with no place to start, I've been avoiding them.  Perhaps this piece is the start.  It might not be in this current incarnation, certainly, but scaling it down into a repeating motif over a book would bring out the best of its delicate nature.  I have more of that thread, though not of the tissue...but I could recreate that, if I felt it was necessary.  Now, all I have to do is get on with it. A way in, at last.

I'm sure you've heard me say 'trust the process', more than once.  I just want to add something to that.  Add time into that process, when all seems lost.  Let your unconscious work out what to do.  It always knows.

The Real Work?

Two different people said two different things, yesterday.  One asked what I made.  The other said that she was concentrating her limited energy on things that were really important.  The combination made me wonder...what is the real work?  Where am I going with all of this?  I've been easing back into textile work, making a quilt here, as a gift, finishing a UFO there....but it doesn't feel like 'real' work.  With that in mind, I sat down and stitched this.  It's called 'Flow'. 

The pink in the image is not real; it's reflecting my cutting mat, through the two layers of lightweight Lutradur which make up two sides of the 'sandwich'; the 'filling' is scrap threads from my friend Clare's loom.  Just before the ME, I was starting to put work together for a possible book, called 'Constructed Cloth'.  I have no desire to weave; too precise and repetitive for me, doesn't suit my personality.  I do, however, being a control freak, wish to have a hand in every stage of the making process, and it turns out that it's not enough to dye the cloth, hence this small piece. 

Here's a detail of the stitch.  I started out experimenting; when I've made this type of constructed cloth before, I focused on circles, just as you can see at the top of the piece.  The middle section of this piece has long curving lines with occasional circles in it.  Overall, it made me think of a river, hence the title, and I added circles top and bottom, to suggest pebble-covered banks.

I then trimmed off the excess, roughly, to see what it looks like.  Not entirely convinced that worked.... I've put it on a dark fabric to let you see it properly.  The colour of the piece comes entirely from the threads sandwiched between the white lutradur layers, very delicate.  I may hit it with a heat gun to expose some of the threads, which would give areas with slightly stronger colour,   It's very small; roughly 11" by 4"; it would actually make a really pretty purse, perhaps that's the answer.

It may not be all that successful, but it does help to defiine what the real work is... intense stitch, transparency, experimentation.  At least it leads to an interesting life.  Incidentally, there's a bit about constructed cloth here; apparently not one of my better days.

Overturning Those Decisions.

You might remember this post, where I talked about using a wee bit of linen that I'd found in the scrap.  Well...I sat down to work with it this morning, while waiting for the mannie to arrive to service my mobility scooter (he's still not here, so much for 'late morning'; it's 12.30pm and not a peep out of him...

I decided that the brown bit was altogether too brown... so I added some frothy white plastic netting, and some stitch to hold it down;

And then more stitch to hold it on the Lutradur XL:

And then, it all went to hell in a handcart.  Putting the lutradur in front of it Just Didn't work.  So I tried other bits of lutradur; worse.  Then I took the long vertical stitches out, removed the brown bit, put the coloured lutradur underneath... nope.  And just as I was about to give up, I tried this:

Yes.  I thought.  Right balance, right texture (it's evolon, coloured with Brusho); could do with being a bit bigger, but hey...  So I tried it against some white evolon:

So what I want to find now, is a piece of textured linen to mount this piece on.  I know I don't have such a thing, so I may settle for cotton, but it does need to be a woven fabric, just to add a bit more texture.  Natural coloured, rather than white, might be better, but it'll all depend on what I find.  Come to think of it, I need to trim the blue; those lines aren't straight, or parallel, for that matter...but it has the distinct feeling of a well conceived piece.  Finally. 

PS The scooter mannie says my scooter is immaculate... so I must be doing something right... or maybe it's just that I don't go out much...sigh.

The Road To Hell...

...is supposedly paved with good intentions; in my case, and maybe yours, too, it's also littered with random materials that we hoarded, thinking, 'I could do something with that'...and then never actually getting round to doing anything at all.  Most of that sort of material got given away during The Great Purge; it is truly interesting to see what I kept.  Working my way through the odds and sods I've been talking about over the past week or so, I came across some hand made paper.  I vaguely remember buying it in Norfolk, quite early on in our residence there, which makes it about ten years old, anyway... good grief...   It's highly textured; I have no idea what it is made from, but it feels fairly fragile.  It appealed, yesterday, so I took it as a starting point...

It's teamed, here, with a piece of transfer dyed lutradur 30, secured with large stitches using hand dyed perle.  It feels like a field, to me... I combined it with another piece of paper, this time a scrunched-up piece of brown paper.  I started working with brown paper (or rather, thinking about working with brown paper) when we were in the Highlands, but it took a workshop in Norfolk, roughly twelve or thirteen years later, to get me to Actually Do It. 

Again, these are stitched together using the same perle thread, in random stitches that reflect the construction of the light-coloured paper.  So far, so good.  It feels like a strong motif; but what to do with it?  Well... I have the habit of buying vintage napkins whenever I see them in charity shops; they tend to be very reasonably priced, and are an ideal size for me to work with.  So, I went for a rake about in my box and found several, but only one that was large enough to work with these bits. 

Hmm.  Needs an iron.  But it has potential...needs something else...

No, not Merlin's tail...but the circle, also from crunched up brown paper, seems to be the right way to go.  Now, where's that iron... ?

And here it is, ready for stitch.  I've pinned the napkin to some white felt, to stabilise it, and give the stitch a bit of depth when I eventually work out what to do with it.  I don't often use pins, preferring to work with fusible, but ironing is exhausting, while pinning requires minimal effort.  ME has forced me to adapt my practice to work round my lack of energy.  Things will be easier, I hope, when my studio is properly set up, but I haven't been well enough to do anything with it yet, other than put a couple of boxes on the new shelves.  Sofa sewing is all I can manage at the moment.

I'm going to let this piece sit for a while, to see what it needs in the way of stitch.  I'd like to add some machine stitch to that circle, nice clear dark line.  Well, ok, curves. There again, more of that random stitch by hand, in a darker colour, might well be better.  We'll see.  Meantime...I found a couple of small, identical napkins while looking for something suitable; wonder if there's anything in the paper stash that would work on them...or the rust stash...or both...   hmmm.  Yes, I did purge dramatically, but I still have choices, albeit on a much smaller scale than before...and that's proving to be A Good Thing.

Changing My Mind, or Stitch Changes Everything.

So... remember that red velvet piece?  Yes, this one...

Remember I said that this was it?  Reader, I was wrong.  And why was that?  Well... it was stitch.  Stitch changes everything.  I started to assemble the piece, as you do, with that top left lutradur element.  It said, I want irregular stitches....and that's what it got...

And what's more, I liked it.  Most of the other elements, however, Just Didn't Fit.  Sigh.  So... I came up with this. 

I'm still using some of the elements from the last version, but somewhat adjusted, with that leaf or blade type motif added at the top of the long vertical, one of the shorter verticals removed, and a second, larger blade or leaf on the bottom left.  It now has a completely different feel.  And then I added stitch, which was the point at which I contemplated giving up...

...more random stitch, including a couple of renegade French Knots.  I always struggle with them, and whilst I think they add something, I'm not sure why I bothered, given the fuss and the time it took to do what really ought to be a totally simple stitch.  I'm contemplating some beads in that upper section, but that may continue to be a contemplation...not sure if I know where my beads actually are at present...sigh.

This looks better in real life, I have to say, but I'm still not convinced that it's anything more than a sketch.  Not a bad sketch, you understand; I feel that the tree/spear thing (I'm pretty sure it's a tree, in my head, but there is a definite reference to spears going on in there somewhere) is worth developing further.  I've always had a thing about trees...but that's another conversation entirely. 

So...what do you think?  Was it worth the effort? 

Monoprint Magic...

...was the title of a workshop I gave at Festival Of Quilts.  'What's so magical about monoprints?', one participant asked in a rather snippy voice, 'I've done them before, I didn't think that there was much magical about it.'  Ouch.  Well, I said, we're using transfer paints.  The magic of transfer printing is that you the one (or two) prints that you usually get from a monoprint plate, becomes four (or five, if you're lucky) prints, as the exhaustion point of the paint is much later than it would be using printing ink.  Oh, she said.  I suspect she was unimpressed...but she seemed to have fun anyway, so it can't have been that bad.

I've written about monoprints, too, in the Evolon book, as a good way of developing a series.  So I guess it was inevitable that when I went through the Evolon I'd kept, I would find a couple of monoprints.  These two are, I suspect, Print One and Print Five, as they get paler and paler as the dye exhausts. 

As you can see, I had already started to work with both.  Print One is clearly the stronger of the two; that yellow really sings.  It needed a treatment that was equally as strong, so I started by needle felting a piece of yarn onto the background.  I think I may add another two, and then see where we go from there. 

Print Five, though, is delicate, much too delicate for needle felting. I really like the structured stitching in the lower section of the piece, it seems to work well.  It was intended to reflect the way that the paint has transferred in this version. 

You can see the lines of texture running across the piece, as the dye exhausts at different rates, allowing the texture to show through; whilst there are similar lines in Print One, they are by no means as obvious. 

So far so good.  It's when it comes to the top section that I changed my mind.  I wanted to have something unstructured up there, originally, as a counter to the structured stitching below.  I didn't want the colour or the stitching to stand out too much, so I selected a variegated green/white/blue.

...and as you can see, you can't see it.  It Just Doesn't Work.  Dammit.  I did consider increasing the size of the stitches...but that didn't seem to work any better, and then I discovered I couldn't find the original thread....so this stitching is Coming Out.  Sigh.  It's going to be replaced with this:

And this is so not what I intended...but I think it's what's needed.  A darker variegated thread, much larger stitches.  I had in mind light rain when I decided how to stitch it.  I think it's an improvement.  I suspect it might have been better if I'd been able to cover that whole area in those small stitches, first, but you have to work with what you've got...well, okay, I have to work with what I have, for a whole load of reasons that I won't bore you with. 

More stitching tomorrow, I think.  And if you want to read more about monoprinting, put monoprinting into the search box at the top of the post, and you'll find other discussions.

Silk Purses...

famously cannot be made from sow's ears.  I showed you a painted photograph, this one, in fact;

and wondered what it would be like if the white stitching was not so white... and here it is.

I think it's an improvement... but only in photograph form.  (I notice that the colour is different in the two images, the top one is closer to the real colour).  The piece itself is too small, I think.  The curves are interesting, but the intense stitching detracts from them, rather than supports them.  I also think that it looks better on screen  because the darks look darker.

All in all, this has been an object lesson in how not to do it, really.  I admit to having my doubts about this piece from the moment it came off the printer. So...what have I learned?   Perhaps the real lesson should be, listen to the inner voice that says, there's not much you can do with this, and spend your time on stuff that does work.  Then, if you insist on ignoring it, think properly about what stitch is going to do.  Stitch is our friend... but not in this case, where it draws attention away from the important parts of the image.  I also think there's a lot to be said for working with these macro images at a larger scale; if I had done that, it might have worked better...there certainly wouldn't have been a place for that fussy stitching.

So what next?  I'm going to overprint it, I think.  In black.  And then, probably, cut it up.  But not today...today, I'm going to work on something that is working well, just to cheer myself up.

Less Is More (part two)

Okay, where was I...

So, I slept on it (not literally of course...).  And when I looked at it next day, I thought... no.  It's still out of balance.

The problem was three fold.  Firstly, the remaining stitching was too intense.  Secondly, the painted transparent cloth that I'd melted back affected the colour of the overall piece, as well as just being Too Much.  And because of that colour change, the triple stripes that were at the heart of the piece were no longer the right colour.  Reader, they clashed.  And they were too thick, somehow, when placed against the more delicate stitching in the first section.  More so in real life than in photograph.  So... I continued to take stitching out from the remaining two sections of the piece.  Fortunately, unlike the rest of it, these sections had been sewn with a single thread on top, making it much easier to remove.  It still took most of an afternoon and evening...sigh.  

That made a big difference, but not quite big enough.  That colour thing was still there.  So, I gritted my teeth and removed the three strips that were at the heart of the piece.  That hurt.  They were in the right place, but they were the wrong colour, and whilst I could have altered the colour, I really didn't want to.  So I peeled them off; luckily they hadn't been ironed on too convincingly, so came off without a problem.

  You can clearly see the difference in this section from the image above; much less texture, no strips, which equals no distraction from the real visual interest, the cloth itself.  But it still didn't feel right.  Another rotation seemed to make it better, and the addition of three lines in a different direction, made this time from wool, felted in place, made the piece acceptable.

This time, the positioning and colouring of the wool echoes and supports the colour in the cloth.  It still sits securely in the 'Linescapes' series, thanks to the added wool lines.  I don't think it's perfect, but early pieces in a series never are... in fact no piece ever is.  If it were, we wouldn't need to make more, and a series would never be born.  

I've learned a lot from this piece.  Firstly, stitch is fine in its place...but its place may not be in this series.  Yesterday, I cut up the rest of this cloth, and have made two further pieces, neither of which will have stitch, I think... here is one of them.

Why no stitch?  In my view, there's no need for it...no room for it.  The piece is fine as it is.  You may not agree, of course, but that's my feeling.  I'l be glad to hear if you agree or disagree.

Less is More...

...or how this...

became this...

It's a long story.

Several years ago, I mooched a cleaning rag from a friend of mine who is a painter in oils.  I liked the look of it, and thought that it wanted stitch; she thought I was barking, but humoured me after a bit of persuasion.  And it has lain about ever since, which, given it is oil paint, was probably Not A Bad Thing.  Raking through the box it was in (the one with the interesting hand dyed/printed/painted fabrics), I thought that its time had come... and promptly cut it in half.  I liked the balance of colours and shapes, the randomness of it, the way that it suggested sea to me, somehow, perhaps because my friend had been painting goldfish in ponds... and because Turner has painted seas in this kind of palette...  who knows?

I wanted to make this the first piece in the 'Linescapes' series I have been slowly working up to; so far, I have a lot of sketches and postcards, but no textile pieces.  I thought I would approach it the same way I have the drawings, by beginning with three curving lines.  I wanted them to be quite small, because the real interest in the piece, I thought, was the painted cloth, and I wanted them to be textured.  So, I thought I'd try taking some dark green velvet, and add some other colours to it, particularly orange, through stitching, which I knew would  add texture and interest.  When I looked at it, having added a bit of stitch, though, I knew it wasn't right.  See for yourself;

Too dark.

This looked better, though...had I had enough of it, I would have used it, and the piece would be completely different.  As it was, I hadn't, so started looking through my scrap stash.

And I found this... 

...at which, a small person in my head jumped up and down with excitement.  That person is rarely wrong, so I put some fusible on a section, cut the lines out, and added them to the piece.  And stitched it.  And added some painted polyester cloth (for once, not lutradur...), and burned it back.

Reader, I hated it.  I rotated it.  I hated it less.

So I figured that I needed to work out what was wrong with it.  I decided that there was Too Much Stitch.  And if I got rid of the stitch, or at least, some of it, I'd feel better about it, because what was important in the piece was the exploration of space...and I had filled up that space with stitch, which was a distraction from what was going on in the cloth.

Okay.  So I thought I would take out a significant amount of the stitching in the larger section to the right of the turquoise/orange strips.  And I did.  And it was interesting... I didn't remove all the stitch, leaving bits and pieces of stitched mark here and there.  Look closely at the piece and you can see the holes in the canvas where the stitches were.

Here's a close up.

And that, I thought, might well be that... but of course, we both know better, because we've seen the after picture... more tomorrow.